


Eudaimonia

by Poetry



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-03 08:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4094401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the world of His Dark Materials, losing your dæmon is a much scarier prospect than losing your face. Or, vignettes from a world where Peter and Nightingale call their enemy the Dæmonless Man. Complete, though I may add scenes if any more occur to me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Apparentia

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title is in Greek and the chapter titles are in Latin. I like to think Nightingale would approve.
> 
> The Greek word eudaimonia means literally “the state of having a good indwelling spirit”; and “happiness” is not at all an adequate translation of this word. […] Aristotle’s answers to the question “What is eudaimonia?” show that for him eudaimonia was not a state of mind consequent on or accompanying certain activities but is a name for these activities themselves. “What is eudaimonia?” is then the same question as “What are the best activities of which man is capable?”  
> – from the Encyclopædia Britannica

The first thing I noticed about the man by the portico was that he dressed like a wayward historical re-enactor, top hat, watch fob and all. The second thing I noticed was that he didn’t have a dæmon.

“He’s got to have one somewhere,” Isaiah said into my ear as we walked over to the strange man. “Maybe she’s small and hiding in a pocket or something. It’s cold enough to freeze off even a dæmon’s bollocks out here.”

I wanted to whisper back _It’s a good thing you haven’t got any bollocks, then,_ but I try to maintain a certain standard of professionalism when dealing with members of the public in my official capacity.

I hoped the man’s dæmon might make an appearance when I asked for his name, but he just said, “My name’s Nicholas Wallpenny, but don’t ask me how to spell it because I never really got my letters.”

Now I was starting to get suspicious. Maybe instead of hiding in his pocket, she was hiding behind the column, waiting to jump out and distract me at a critical moment. It’s happened to me before. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of places even a dæmon the size of a Great Dane can hide in London before jumping out at unsuspecting coppers. Isaiah didn’t need any prompting to take off from my shoulder and fly a circuit around the two nearest columns, beating his wings hard to keep steady in the wind.

But when Isaiah landed on my shoulder again, he whispered in my ear, “Nothing. And I’m not flying in that wind again unless it’s an emergency, got it?”

“If you’ve witnessed something,” I said to the dæmonless man, as if my dæmon hadn’t spoken at all, “perhaps you’d better come and give a statement.“

“That would be a bit of a problem,” said Nicholas. “Seeing as I’m dead.”

Well. That would explain the striking lack of a dæmon. Except that it was stark bollocking mad. I said, “If you’re worried about your safety…”

“I ain’t worried about anything anymore, squire, on account of having been dead these last hundred and twenty years.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Isaiah said, before I could stop him. “Could your dæmon please introduce him- or herself?”

“She can’t,” Nicholas said flatly, showing for the first time an emotion besides smarmy affability. “She scarpered off to the Beyond when I died. Left me alone. You know how it goes.”

“You’re dead,” I said, as much to say the words and make them feel more real as anything else. My brain kept throwing up ideas of what it must be like to linger on for over a hundred years after your body and even your dæmon were gone, which really wasn’t helping. “You’re really dead.”

Nicholas stepped forward, and I could see in the light that he was transparent. “Shit,” Isaiah breathed in my ear. “He really hasn’t got a dæmon hiding somewhere.”

No, he really fucking didn’t. 

“Ghosts have always got dæmons in the movies,” Isaiah said, a little hysterically. “Even the really freaky Japanese horror movies.”

“You’re dead. So how come we’re talking?” my mouth said, without any input from upstairs.

“You must have a touch of the sight,” said Nicholas. “Not surprising, eh, with a dæmon like yours? ‘A crow on the thatch, soon death lifts the latch.’”

I wanted to tell him, as I’ve had to inform nearly every person I’ve ever met at some point or another, that none of the Celtic folklore about crows really applies to Isaiah, seeing as he’s a New Caledonian crow, a famous tool-making species native to an island over 10,000 miles east of any place the Celts ever saw. But the witness is supposed to give the police information, not the other way round, and just because I’d gone mad didn’t mean I should stop acting like a policeman. Even if I kind of wanted to grab onto Isaiah and not let go until my brain stopped gibbering about getting stuck for eternity after death without him.

It’s weird interviewing a witness who hasn’t got a dæmon. At Hendon they train you to watch the witness’ dæmon, because they’re the most likely to give away a crucial tell. They give you the basics of body language for each type of dæmon: fur-licking for mammals, wing twitches for birds, and the like. Without a dæmon I felt like I was getting only half the picture. But I took notes as best I could, even the really weird bit at the end.

“The killing gentleman didn’t just change his hat and coat, he changed his dæmon,” said Nicholas. “Now tell me that ain’t uncanny.”

“So the killer was an adolescent?” I said.

“Not at all. I’d say he was at least thirty. But one minute he had a bloody great spider on his shoulder, the next it was a bleeding bird of paradise. And don’t tell me he found it on the street. I may not have seen my Charamis in a hundred and twenty years, but I still know a dæmon when I see one.”

Someone called my name. I turned around. Lesley was back with the coffees. For a moment a cold shiver went down my spine. I couldn’t see her dæmon.

“‘Course you can’t see him,” Isaiah said. “Windy night like this, he’s tucked away in that protective case Lesley wears on her belt.”

So it was. In the clear plastic case clipped to the belt on Lesley’s uniform, Barcallum buzzed his wings and flicked his long bee tongue in Isaiah’s direction. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Isaiah had turned round to look back at Nicholas. He whispered, “He’s vanished.”

“Do you want this coffee or not?” Lesley said impatiently.

For an absurd moment I wanted to ask her to open Barcallum’s case, just so Isaiah could check him to make sure he was really there. But it was fine. Everything was fine. Except that I’d just got done with an interview with a ghost.


	2. Corvus et Aquila

For the second night in a row, I went back to the church.

It was partly because I wanted to prove to Isaiah once and for all that we weren’t mad, a proposition he’d put forward several times in the last two days. And yes, it was partly because I wanted to escape my grim fate as an officer in the Case Progression Unit. But most of all, it was because I needed to understand. How had I been able to see a ghost? Could I do it again? And how could a grown man’s dæmon change from a tarantula into a bird of paradise?

“Peter,” Isaiah said, nipping me on the ear. I swear I ought to have a callus on my left ear by now from Isaiah nipping it to break me out of my thoughts so many times. “Look. Across the Piazza.”

And for the second time in three days, I saw a man who didn’t appear to have a dæmon.

Of course, at this distance, it could just be a small dæmon tucked away somewhere I couldn’t see. But the man wore an elegantly tailored suit, trimmed so close to the lines of his body that I’d have seen a lump if he’d had a dæmon in any of his pockets.

“Maybe he’s another ghost,” I said. “Some poor bloke who died in the 1940s while out on the pull.”

“Some things never change and all that?” said Isaiah.

The man came closer. He didn’t look transparent, but then none of the lights were particularly bright. Then, finally, I noticed the thick leather padding on the man’s left shoulder, marring the otherwise flawless pattern of the suit. A large eagle swooped down from the dark sky and settled on his shoulder, talons gripping the leather. She must have been perched atop one of the streetlights. Now there was a dramatic entrance, I had to admit.

The man’s gait didn’t so much as hitch.

I bet he’d be able to lift twice as much weight with his left arm as his right, what with carrying a dæmon like that around.

”Hello,” he said, in the cut-glass tones of the old-school BBC radio announcer. “What are you up to?”

Not much to lose by telling the truth. At this point, I was disappointed the man hadn’t been a ghost after all. “I’m ghost-hunting.”

”Interesting. Any particular ghost?”

”Nicholas Wallpenny.”

“What’s your name and address?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

The man showed his warrant card. “Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale.”

For a moment I worried he’d try to nick me for intent to perpetrate an obscene act, but his dæmon introduced herself, making the introduction a little more personal. “Aletheia,” she said, and I swear if you blindfolded me I wouldn’t know the difference between her voice and the Queen’s.

“Constable Peter Grant,” I said.

“Out of Charing Cross nick?”

“Yes, sir.”

My dæmon relaxed just enough to introduce himself as well. “Isaiah.”

Aletheia tilted her head and fixed Isaiah with an intense stare, her eyes like two amber lasers. In that measured, regal, old lady voice, she said, “A New Caledonian crow, unless I miss my guess.”

I gaped. In my entire settled life, not a single person has correctly identified Isaiah’s species without consulting a bird guide or Google. Isaiah said, a little hoarsely, “You’re not wrong. How did you…”

“I’ve been to Nouvelle-Calédonie,” the eagle dæmon said, in a flawless French accent, naturally. “It’s difficult to miss the crows there. Exceptionally curious birds, always coming to have a look at anything new. Clever, too.”

Isaiah and I found that for once in our lives, we could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Carry on, Constable,” DCI Nightingale said. Aletheia took flight from his shoulder, and he went strolling back up James Street.

I waited there a little longer, hoping the ghost would put in an appearance, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Then I got out my phone and tried to work out on Google what sort of bird Aletheia was. When everyone you meet over a certain age comes conveniently labeled with an animal form that describes the essence of their being, it pays to do all the zoological research you can.


	3. Levamentum

I poured one out for me and Lesley, adding to each of our glasses until the beer was finished. I stared at my glass, wishing it were something stronger, and took a long swig. I tried to work up the courage to proposition Lesley, maybe go in for a kiss. Going by her carpenter bee dæmon, settled comfortably on Isaiah’s beak, it looked like I might have a chance. Isaiah’s eyes were closed. He looked like he’d found some kind of peace. Maybe I could have some, too, if only Lesley would reach out and touch me.

But instead, Lesley said, “What really happened inside that house?”

I chugged my beer. Lesley had a right to know. I just had no idea how I was going to get the words out. So instead, Isaiah said, “His dæmon melted. Like candlewax. She looked blurry when we came in, and then her legs melted away, until she was just a swirl of multicolored lights, like a baby dæmon when it’s just born. I thought for a second she was going to hang on, but then she was gone.”

Barcallum buzzed comfortingly against Isaiah, licking his feathers with flickers of his long tongue.

“I’ve seen some pretty bad deaths,” I said. “You know how car accidents get. But I’ve never seen anything like that. It was unnatural. Horrible.”

“So that’s magic, then?” said Lesley. “Can Inspector Nightingale do something like that?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to think about it.

“That eagle watching over us in the garden,” said Lesley. “While I tried to resuscitate the baby. That wasn’t an eagle.”

It hadn’t really registered at the time, I was that panicked, but I’d already figured out by now that Nightingale had run into the Coopertowns’ house without Aletheia. She’d stayed with Lesley outside while she called the ambulance. That was impossible, of course. But so were ghosts and melting dæmons. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

“Did you know she could do that?” said Barcallum, in his piping little voice. Isaiah’s always liked that about him. Both he and Lesley are so sturdy, and then there’s his voice like a tiny silver thread.

“No,” said Isaiah. “But I’m glad she did.”

“Are you going to be able to do that?” said Barcallum.

“What?” said Isaiah.

“When you join Nightingale’s spooky X-Files ghost-hunting unit. Do you get the special powers?”

“He didn’t say he was going to –” I began.

“Peter,” said Lesley. “He will. Are you going to say yes?”

Isaiah and me both stared at her. For a moment, we drank our beer in silence. Then she raised her eyebrows and Isaiah finally said, “Are you kidding? You think I’d pass up getting a crow’s-eye view of London? Of course I want to learn magic.”

“It really ought to scare the piss out of you,” said Lesley.

“It does,” I said. “God, it does.” The image of Brandon Coopertown’s tarantula dæmon melting into ectoplasm sprang into my mind in full Technicolor. I shuddered, even though I hated doing it front of Lesley, who was so much stronger than me in so many ways. But Barcallum buzzed into the soft feathers on Isaiah’s head, and Lesley got up and hugged me, my head to her collarbone.  I felt her throat work against my cheek, and I think she might have been crying, but I was too polite to mention it.


	4. Tactus Disvitae

The night after Lesley and I testified at Celia Munroe’s trial, me and Nightingale had dinner in the dining room – not just a room for eating in, you understand, a proper dining room. I wore a button-down shirt and everything. Aletheia and Isaiah perched next to our chairs on stands wrought to look like miniature trees. Isaiah looked absurdly small on his, which was large enough to hold up a dæmon even bigger than a lesser spotted eagle like Aletheia. (She’s not called a lesser spotted eagle because she’s small, mind you, only because she has fewer spots than a greater spotted eagle.)

Over our dinner, a old-fashioned roast with peas and potatoes, Nightingale said, “I would like to offer you a choice.” The way he said it I half-expected him to get out a red pill and a blue pill. “Tomorrow I am going to attend to a matter in Purley that is relevant to your roles both as a policeman and an apprentice. You may join me if you wish, but I urge you not to take the decision lightly. If you do come with me, it will change you. Permanently.”

Nightingale didn’t sound like he was ready to be interrupted, but I did it anyway. “Do all wizards do it? This thing you’re going to do?”

“Traditionally, it’s expected of all wizards, yes. But I won’t have you do it unless you’re certain.” Nightingale gave his dæmon a meaningful look.

I could feel Aletheia’s eyes drilling into Isaiah like lasers. She said, “If you do this, Isaiah, you will be able to separate from Peter, like I can from my Thomas.”

Excitement lit up inside my chest. Isaiah said, “Could I fly to the North Pole?”

“Technically you could,” said Aletheia, “but I wouldn’t recommend it. The winds over the North Sea are ferocious.”

I really wanted to know how exactly she knew that, but already I was starting to learn what kinds of questions she and Nightingale would answer straight off and which ones they wouldn’t. “Will I know where he is if he goes flying off?”

“You’ll have a general sense, but no specifics, at least not without certain formae,” said Nightingale. “But please, Peter, I need you to focus on the question at hand. The process of separation is… traumatic. I’m sure you and Isaiah have tested your current range, so you’re familiar with the sensation of reaching its limit. What happens upon separation is far worse.”

I shared an uneasy look with Isaiah. Nightingale was right, of course. Soon after Isaiah settled, when I was sixteen, we did experiments. I sat on the edge of a dry fountain early one winter morning when only the occasional jogger was out. Isaiah started at my feet and hopped farther and farther away from me. He held one end of a string in his beak while I unspooled it from a ball between my knees. By the time he got two and a half meters away (I measured the string afterward) we were both shaking and tears started filling my eyes. It felt like my chest cavity was full of ice cubes. A few centimeters more, and we couldn’t bear it any longer. He came flying back to perch on my knee and rub his face against my cheek.

The idea of doing something like that but even worse wasn’t exactly appealing. But if we did it, we could be in two places at once. What copper hasn’t wanted to be able to do that at one point or another? And there would be so much of London Isaiah would get to see that he never could before. There were so many rooftops and spires I’d read about in books that I’d never got a good look at, and to anyone but an experienced birdwatcher, Isaiah would blend right in with the rest of the crows.

Isaiah fluttered to my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “I am so going to check out the gargoyles on Westminster Abbey.” I smiled. “Not to mention,” he went on, “this is part of being a wizard, isn’t it? I want to experience wizardry. All of it. Even the scary bits.”

“What’s it like?” I said.

“I’m not going to tell you,” said Nightingale. “If you agree, I want you to form your own understanding. You should also know that this is not your only chance to perform the separation. You can choose to postpone it to a later date.”

“We’ll do it, sir,” Isaiah said.

“Very well,” Nightingale said. “I’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning.”

  


To my surprise, Nightingale let me drive the Jag. I was delighted, of course, but it also made me a little nervous. I felt a bit like a soldier getting one last cigarette from my commanding officer before I had to go over the top into no-man’s-land.

At Purley Station, we met a gruff military sort from the Fire Brigade named Frank Caffrey, whose porcupine dæmon had fearsome quills at least ten times as long as a hedgehog’s. He gave us two hand grenades, which did nothing good for my nerves. Then he gave me a steady look and wished me the best, which was even worse.

Nightingale directed me to a quiet residential street. I parked and we walked along the road until Nightingale stopped in front of a particular gate. “Wait here,” he said, and went through the gate. Aletheia didn’t follow. She perched on a gatepost like a gargoyle. Past the gate was another one leading to a side passage. Nightingale popped the lock out of the gate without even looking at it, then held it open.

“What do you see?” Aletheia said, looking down at me and Isaiah.

Isaiah opened his wings a little to take off and have a look, but Aletheia glared and said, “No. Stay here. Just look.”

We looked down the path beyond the gate. There were flowerpots lined along the sunny side, but the plants were shriveled and black, as if they’d been dead a long time.

“Good,” said Aletheia. “Pay close attention. Now, step through, Peter.”

I stepped forward.

“Not you, Isaiah,” Aletheia said. “Just Peter.”

I swallowed. Isaiah flew up to perch on the gate beside the eagle dæmon. I stepped through. By the time I was level with Nightingale, I was starting to feel the strain.

Nightingale bent down and picked up a handful of soil. He sniffed it. I did the same. It didn’t have a proper earthy smell, just a sterile non-smell like dirt left to dry indoors for years. I felt Nightingale watching me in an assessing sort of way, but he didn’t say anything.

“What is this?” I said finally, just to break the silence. “Some kind of _vestigia_?”

“ _Vestigium_ ,” Nightingale corrected. “It’s called _tactus disvitae._ The touch of antilife. It’s why our dæmons cannot enter here.”

I turned back to look at Isaiah. He must have heard that, because he opened his wings and leaned forward to take off in my direction. But he didn’t move. As he leaned toward me, he started to shiver, as if there were a strong cold wind blowing in his face. He puffed up his feathers, but it made no difference. He could hop straight up, side to side, any direction at all except toward the house.

“How did this happen?” I said. I didn’t look at Nightingale. I couldn’t take my eyes away from Isaiah, his wings spread for flight, rooted to the spot.

“You’ll see for yourself,” said Nightingale. “But to do that, we have to enter the house.”

I looked down the path toward the house. The front garden looked like it was about five meters away. It might as well have been across the Channel.

Isaiah called to me. “You can do it, Peter. Go ahead. I’ll be waiting.”

I turned back to him and cleared my throat. “I…”

“Don’t you want to find out what’s in there?” Isaiah said. “Don’t you want me to tell you what St. Paul’s Cathedral looks like from the roof? Go on!”

I took one last look at my dæmon, the sunlight gleaming off his glossy dark feathers and silvery beak. Then I turned around and let out a long shaky breath. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Two more steps, and I was sweating all over my body. The inside of my ribcage felt cold and empty. Another step, and I started to turn around to look at Isaiah, because I could walk backwards toward the house, just so I could _see_ him, couldn’t I? I felt a warm touch on my shoulder and I realized it was Nightingale guiding me forward. I really ought to have been embarrassed, but the touch felt too much like a lifeline to throw it away for the sake of manly ego.

Another step. Another. It felt like the pressure of Nightingale’s hand behind my shoulder was the only thing keeping me from flying backward toward the fence, like a magnetic pole drawn toward its opposite. Behind me I could hear Isaiah give a horrible rasping shout that set all the birds in the neighborhood to screeching right along with him. My legs shook and I had to hold onto Nightingale’s arm to keep from staggering to my knees. I leaned on him until he settled me down on the edge of the house’s garden patio. I pressed my face against my knees and caught my breath.

“I can’t believe how far away he is,” I said.

“Don’t look at the gate,” Nightingale advised. “Just keep moving on. It’s the easiest way.”

Isaiah wasn’t there to stop me from saying unwise, so I asked, “Was it like this when you did it?”

There was a silence so long I thought Nightingale was just going to ignore the question, until he said, “I fared rather worse, actually. But I was fifteen at the time, so that’s only to be expected.”

I wanted to ask him what kind of evil arsehole would make a child go through this, but I knew the answer: it was the same kind of person who sent small children to boarding school to build their character. So, basically, the sort of people who probably lived in the Folly before it got so empty. So instead, I asked, “When does it get better?”

“Once you’re reunited with Isaiah, separation will never hurt you again. Aletheia and I have been separate for months at a time without ill effect.”

I straightened up and looked at Nightingale. “Didn’t you miss her?”

He just looked at me like I was being really dense, which to be fair I was. “Are you ready to continue?”

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I kept wondering how Isaiah was doing. It was a weird feeling, to not know exactly how he was. But I wanted to know exactly how this _tactus disvitae_ worked that kept him so far away. “Yes, sir.”

I stood and faced the house. The garden, like the flowerpots, was gone to wrack and ruin. The curtains were drawn over the windows. It seemed as if no one had been there in years. Nightingale wasn’t holding onto me anymore, but he stayed close by. I tried not to feel self-conscious about it. After all, I still felt like I had ice in my guts and a chorus of bees in my ears. I walked shoulder-to-shoulder with him around to the kitchen, where he smashed the window open with his cane and let us in.

When I looked around the kitchen, I said, “There are kids living here,” until I realized how absurd that was. Any normal person who found their dæmon couldn’t come inside the front gate anymore would go and find another house somewhere far, far away.

Nightingale looked grim. “Not anymore,” he said. “That was one of the things that alerted us.”

My skin crawled. Did this _tactus disvitae_ happen while they were still in the house? What would have happened to their dæmons then? If Isaiah had been there, he would have told me to stop thinking about it. But he wasn’t, so my brain flashed through worse and worse possibilities, including something disturbingly like what happened to Brandon Coopertown’s dæmon.

We searched the first floor of the house, then went upstairs. The window at the top of the stairs was covered in black construction paper, blocking the sunlight. I stood there for a moment and stared at the child’s drawing on the construction paper. Nightingale was giving me a worried look, so I shook my head and said, “Vampires. There are vampires in here.”

Nightingale gripped my shoulder and steered me toward the nearest bedroom. “Let’s find them before they find us, shall we?”

We checked the upstairs rooms quickly and methodically. Like the television downstairs, the computers and alarm clocks up here had white grainy sand coming from their seams. I wanted to investigate, but Nightingale kept urging me on. It was just as well. Without Isaiah there to keep me steady, the sight of the children’s neat, sterile, empty little rooms made shivers start up that I couldn’t stop. My teeth were chattering as we went back down the stairs. I couldn’t even look in Nightingale’s direction, I was so ashamed of how badly I was bearing up.

“Peter,” said Nightingale. “If you need to go back to your dæmon, do it.” There was no pity or contempt in his level gray eyes, just practicality. If I couldn’t do my job right now, then I needed to leave before I put either of us in danger.

I imagined what Isaiah would say if he were here. _Vampires_ , he’d say. _Are you really going to miss out on seeing vampires? Even if they’re really, really creepy?_ And he would be right. With Isaiah or without him, I wanted to slay some vampires.

I shook my head and got the tremors under control. “I can do this, sir. Let’s go.”

We went downstairs into the basement. It felt like walking into a freezing wind, and I realized that this must be the same _vestigia_ that had stopped Isaiah from going past the gate. I wondered if he was still feeling it.

“Are you feeling this?” said Nightingale.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Downstairs, lying on a bare mattress, were two ragged people who had no dæmons. A hysterical giggle threatened rise in my throat. Nightingale and I were here too and we didn’t have dæmons either, so what was I so afraid of? But we did have dæmons, of course. They were waiting for us at the gate. Nightingale without Aletheia still looked, somehow, like he ought to have her there, like there was an empty place above his shoulder. With the vampires, it was different. They didn’t need dæmons any more than a pair of wax sculptures did. They were too still, like perfectly preserved corpses.

Nightingale handed me a framed family photograph I hadn’t noticed him nick from the mantelpiece. It was a photo of a man and a woman with a possum and a lizard dæmon, respectively. When I went to identify the vampires, it was so hard to imagine those dæmons curled up beside them now that I could barely recognize them in the photo. But I recognized them, even though half of them had been stripped away, leaving these empty shells behind. Their bodies were cold, with no heartbeat. I hadn’t expected anything different. “Nothing,” I said.

We pulled the pins on the grenades and tossed them down the stairs. I started running as soon as I heard mine hit the basement floor. The need for my dæmon burned so strong I nearly stopped to be sick by the front door, but the double thump of the grenades going offscared me right out of my nausea. I could smell a harsh chemical smoke behind me, then hear a thin, inhuman scream, but I didn’t look back. Isaiah was waiting for me ahead, and he was all that mattered.

Nightingale and I ran through the front gate. His dæmon floated gently down to his shoulder, but Isaiah came at me like a feathery missile. I caught him in my hands and held him against my chest, his head beneath my chin. “You made it,” he said. “You made it. Aletheia told me you’d be fine, but I was so frightened. What happened in there?”

Behind me, I could hear concerned neighbors coming out to find out what was going on, and Nightingale and Aletheia using their smooth, charming “We’re the police” voices to keep them calm. I smiled. “You won’t believe it.”

“Come on! Just because we can separate now doesn’t mean we can withhold information. It’s not fair!”

My smile got wider. I’d be just as indignant if Isaiah refused to tell me something he saw on a fly-by. “We just blew up two vampires. Come on, let’s help Nightingale and Aletheia. I’ll tell you all about it in the car.”

  


A couple of weeks later, both Isaiah and I were able to cast a werelight, together and separately. We started to go through cell phones with inconvenient speed. It was that, our memorable brush with _tactus disvitae,_ and what we remembered of A-level physics that started us wondering whether magic might have something to do with Dust.


	5. Forma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set at the denouement of _Rivers of London_. Forma means form or shape, though the title has a different significance in this scene.

“Can I talk to Barcallum directly?” Isaiah said. He was looking at Barcallum, not at Leslie. I hadn’t let myself look at Barcallum yet. From the way Isaiah’s feathers rustled against each other, puffed out and trembling as if it were freezing in the room, Barcallum was in a bad way.

“Of course you can, my little omen bird,” said Henry Pyke.

I clenched my teeth on yet another explanation that the Morrigan’s death birds were _Corvus corone_ , not _Corvus moneduloides_ , and forced myself to look at Barcallum as Isaiah asked him, “Are you okay?”

Barcallum wasn’t okay. The yellow fur on his head and back had run together into a soft blob, and his wings didn’t have their fine web of veins tracing through them. He looked warped, faded, as if taking the form of a rabble-rousing rook had overstretched the limits of his body. It made me sick to look at. He said, in his thready little voice, “What do you think?” He reached up with a foreleg to groom his fur, and curled in on himself a little when he felt the strange new texture there. “It’s happened. Hasn’t it.”

I looked away, back to Lesley’s face with Henry Pyke still behind it. There was something deeply wrong about having two different people behind the wheel of a human and her dæmon.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Isaiah said.

“You’re such a bad liar,” Barcallum said. “No wonder Peter turned out like he did. It isn’t healthy for a dæmon to tell a person the truth all the bloody time.”

“Peter already thinks he’s invincible,” said Isaiah. “Think what he’d be like if I lied to spare his feelings.”

“You’ve got a point there.”

I only half-paid attention to the conversation; I had to get Henry Pyke to leave Lesley and Barcallum alone. I cast a werelight and talked him through it. At the same time, Isaiah cast a werelight of his own. It wasn’t easy to divide our attentions like this, but we’d practiced, separating to different labs and casting werelights at the same time.

While I talked Pyke to the other side, Isaiah nudged the werelight toward Barcallum. He asked, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“We talked with Dr. Walid,” said Isaiah. “Dæmons are bound together with Dust, and we’re pretty sure magic comes from Dust. Touch the light. It doesn’t burn. It’ll help.”

Henry Pyke took my own werelight into himself and went off to meet his final reward. Then Barcallum began to melt into the werelight like a wax sculpture in a flame, and he and Lesley screamed.

“It’s working,” Isaiah said hoarsely. “He’s merging with the werelight, something’s happening, it’s got to…”

Barcallum had merged with the werelight. He was glowing with it. But he was still melting.

“Barcallum,” Isaiah said. “You’re a bee. You’re not a lump, you’re not a rook, you’re a carpenter bee. A big sturdy bee that can go out and forage even when it’s windy and the grass is frosted over and all the other bees are in their hidey-holes. A bee with strong wing muscles that buzz against the flower and get out every last grain of pollen. A bee that can drill right through solid wood but never builds a new nest when re-using an old one will do. A bee with big eyes so they can see everything around it as it patrols its territory. You remember, right? That’s you right down to the ground, isn’t it? Tough, strong, thorough, efficient, always keeping an eye out…”

It was a desperate play, just as my speech about a good dramatic exit to Henry Pyke had been. But it worked. The wax dulled and began to gather together: a round shape, six legs, two wings, as crude as a child’s clay sculpture, but a bee all the same.

Then finally, finally, Dr. Walid and the emergency workers stormed in, and Isaiah collapsed against me as we slid together into unconsciousness.


	6. Invisibilia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set between _Rivers of London_ and _Moon Over Soho_. "Invisibilia" is Latin for "unseen things."

“Have you or Dr. Walid ever tried taking pictures of magic with Asriel photography?” I asked one morning over breakfast.

Nightingale gave me a blank look. I sighed. Of course he didn’t know what that was. “You’ve heard of Lord Asriel, right? He came out of seemingly nowhere and set himself up as some kind of warlord in Eastern Europe in the 1990s during all the fighting. He did some weird research in his compound, mostly weapons and helicopters, that sort of thing, but he also had a method for developing photos so that they showed Dust. His people would go out on battlefields, after, and take pictures of people as they died. Creepy stuff, but he got photos of the Dust dissipating from people’s bodies at the moment of death. He disappeared at the end of the wars, and no one ever found his experimental weapons as far as anyone knows, but the formula for the developing fluid survived. Scientists use it to study Dust in the lab.”

Nightingale raised his eyebrows. “What exactly are you proposing, Peter?”

“You’re always saying you’re not sure whether or not magic comes from manipulating Dust. I want to use Asriel photography to find out for certain.”

Isaiah gave Aletheia a shrewd look and said, “And if it works, it’s a way people outside the Folly can check for magic.”

“I’m not certain that’s a good thing,” Aletheia said, tilting her head. “The Rivers wouldn’t take well to having their Courts photographed, for example.”

“Crime scene use only,” I said. “We can establish a protocol. IVA: Initial Vestigia Assessment.”

Nightingale considered this. “It’s certainly worth a try. But first I want to see some progress on _scindere_ and on fifth declensions.”

  


The Asriel emulsion is expensive, so I only bought a little for my trial run. Then of course I had to get a camera that used actual film. I took a few test photos in the Folly because I’d never used anything but digital before.

I remembered from my physics A-level that Dust, known in physics textbooks as Rusakov particles, lingers at higher than background-level around any artifact created by people, so I drove out to Hampstead Heath at night and walked down a nature trail until, according to the refresher on Rusakov physics I read online, I was at enough of a distance from man-made artifacts that the background Dust levels would be at baseline. I took some control photos of the woods around me.

Of course, there was the problem of me and Isaiah contaminating the picture with our own Dust, so Isaiah perched on a high branch of a tree, cast a werelight, and floated it out until it hovered among the trees like a streetlight without a pole. I aimed my camera upward and took two pictures, just to be sure I’d got it. Isaiah let the werelight go, and I took a third picture to see if I could catch the vestigia. Then Isaiah plucked a twig off his branch and floated it out with _impello_ , and I repeated the protocol on the twig, taking a picture of it after it had dropped to the ground.

I had to convert one of the disused labs into an impromptu darkroom, I nearly spilled the developing fluid all over myself, and the whole process took much longer than I’d hoped, but I did manage to develop the photos. I held up the first picture of the werelight to the red light of the darkroom and stared.

It reminded me of an experiment we did in A-level physics where we visualized a magnetic field on a flat surface using iron filings: lines of force made visible with metallic grit, forming an oval around the magnet and expanding outward at the poles. The visible light spectrum was dim in this photo, leaving the werelight as faint as a will o’wisp, but there was a weave of golden light around the werelight, with more lines of force trailing outward. The lines were thickest in the direction of the tree where Isaiah was perched, but there were some thicker lines coming toward me, too.

“It draws Dust from available sources,” Isaiah murmured. “Like brains. Or microchips. Do microchips have a lot of Dust?”

I looked at the after-photo. There was no werelight in this one, but there was an afterimage, a globe a little larger than the werelight with patterns of concentric spheres and lightning-bolt criss-crosses. Isaiah and I stared at it a long moment. “We need to show Nightingale,” I said.

Nightingale had been exasperated with how much time this project was taking up, but when I told him I had results to show him, he looked pretty keen. First I showed him a control photo to give him a sense of what he was looking at, then I showed him the first picture of Isaiah’s werelight.

He reached out and touched it gently with his fingertips, tracing the curving golden lines. His mouth opened a little, then spread into a smile. “It’s beautiful.”

Isaiah hopped up to sit beside Aletheia on her perch, where they could both see the photo too. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.” We’d forgotten how much Nightingale _likes_ magic. He treats it like a useful tool most of the time, but it’s more than that to him. It’s an art he devoted his life to, and now he was getting it in a whole new way.

Nightingale was just as interested in the _vestigia_ photo. “Something about both of these photos reminds me of the _forma_ itself. This pattern may be a unique identifier, like a _signare_.”

“We can find out,” I said. “We can go out to Hampstead Heath and I’ll take photos of Aletheia using the same _formae_.”

“Yes, I think that’s a good idea,” said Nightingale, flipping to the next photo. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Isaiah dance a little jig on the perch. We love it when we can get Nightingale and Aletheia to help with an experiment, which isn’t often.

The floating twig also had a net of Dust around it, though the shape and weave were different. The _vestigium_ was also different, a pattern on the twig like overlapping scales with curves of light trailing off the edges like worn-down feathers.

“Abdul will want to see this,” Nightingale said, tracing the patterns with his fingers again. I almost told him he’d leave smears if he kept doing that, but I didn’t have the heart. “He’s always wondered if magic might be visible on the right wavelengths, and what it would look like if it were.”

Here’s the thing about Nightingale and Aletheia: they fought in a hard, bloody war, and it shows. Aletheia is always alert, even when Nightingale is just sitting and reading, and they almost never look in the same direction at once. So when I saw them both staring at the photo, I exchanged a look with Isaiah, and a thought that Dr. Walid wasn’t the only one who’d always wanted to know what magic looked like.


	7. In Loco Parentis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set between _Moon Over Soho_ and _Whispers Under Ground_ , it's the Peter-gets-into-a-lab-accident-and-scares-Nightingale cliché, with a dæmonic twist. "In loco parentis" means "in place of the parent."

“ _Aer palma_ ,” said Isaiah, shaping the forma in his mind, and this time, finally, it took. He was hovering near the ceiling of the lab, barely needing to beat his wings at all. “It worked! I can hover like a hummingbird like this, it’s brilliant! Peter, are you taking notes?”

I was, of course. And then the bubble of thickened air expanded until Isaiah was crushed against the ceiling. He cried out, the forma dissolved, and he fell straight down to the lab bench before he could catch himself.

My vision swam in sympathetic disorientation, and I rushed forward to gather up my dæmon. Nightingale must have heard the scream, because I could hear footsteps too heavy to be Lesley’s thundering toward the door, which soon burst inward.

“Peter! Are you all right?” Both Nightingale and his dæmon were there, even though they often separate when they’re inside the Folly, where none of us will find it odd.

“Fine,” Isaiah groaned. He hurt all over, and he wasn’t going to fly again for the rest of the day at least, but it wasn’t like medicine did any good for a dæmon. “It was me, not Peter.”

Aletheia gave him a glare like only an eagle can and flew over to land on the lab bench and get a closer look. “As if that’s any better. What have you done this time, Isaiah?”

He explained his idea to use _aer_ and _palma_ to suspend himself in the air like a helicopter.

“Peter,” said Nightingale, with all the patient gravitas of a martyr. “I have every reason to believe that you understand basic aerodynamics. _Aer_ thickens the air, but that alone is not enough to generate lift. I could have told you as much if you’d asked me first.”

When he put it that way, I had to admit it sounded pretty obvious. The silence stretched until I realized Nightingale was waiting for some kind of acknowledgment. “Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

“Then why do you continue to experiment on your own and put yourself in danger?” Nightingale watched me sternly, but Aletheia was still inspecting Isaiah like a medic on the battlefield. It’s true what they taught at Hendon. It’s always the dæmon that gives away the crucial tells.

In truth, it was mostly because Isaiah and I couldn’t stand getting looked at the way Aletheia and Nightingale were looking right now. It made me feel like I was under a microscope, and I like being at the other end of the scope a lot better. But instead of saying all that, I jerked a thumb at Isaiah, tucked in the crook of my arm. “It’s literally in my nature to experiment, sir. Give a bird like him a wire and he’ll turn it into a fishing hook. Give me a forma and I’ll try to learn everything it can do. I can’t help it.”

Aletheia tilted her head. In her slow, stately voice, she said, “It’s in an eagle’s nature to sit idly by while one of its chicks pecks the other to death. I have no intention of following that example.”

Nightingale nodded. “It’s important to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, but we mustn’t treat them as inevitabilities. From now on you’re to practice in the same room with Lesley when she’s at work on her formae. Perhaps she’ll be a good influence on you.”

Then Aletheia flicked her tail in a certain way that I’ve come to understand is a smile, launched into the air, and spoke a fourth-order spell that included _aer_. She hovered in the air just behind and above Nightingale’s head as he walked out.

“Show off!” Isaiah called after her. “When do I get to learn that?”


	8. Hereditas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set during _Broken Homes_ , after the Spring Court, because I had to have a scene with Abigail. "Hereditas" in this context means "inheritance".

The first badge I came up with for Abigail’s Magic Girl Guide program was the Riverine Folklore badge. I had her read the least boring books I could find about the Thames and had her visit all the South London rivers that weren’t underground. It taught her some important lessons, and it kept her busy for quite a while, which was the point. I designed the badge in Photoshop as best I could manage, the twisting blue curves of the Thames set on a rough map of London, and printed it out on iron-on transfer paper. Abigail sneered at my paltry graphic design skills, but the next time she came by the Folly, I saw she’d ironed it onto a white tote bag.

The second badge I made up was the Asriel Photography badge. I taught her how to develop the photos, then had her take photos of the outside of the Folly, front and back.

“Can I take a picture of the Jag?” Abigail said. Her dæmon, Halei, held the camera in his little monkey hands.

“I’m pretty sure Nightingale would have told me if the Jag was magic,” I said.

“Are you sure about that?” Isaiah whispered in my ear.

Actually, I wasn’t, but anyway it didn’t put Abigail off. “I want to see the Dust around the Jag.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

Halei passed the camera back to Abigail and turned into a rat so he could ride on her shoulder and have a look through the camera viewfinder. Isaiah and me stayed out of the way so we wouldn’t contaminate the photos.

I stayed in the room with Abigail as she developed the photos to make sure she didn’t spill any of the emulsion – that stuff is seriously expensive and I’ve found myself using more and more of it as time goes on – so I was there when Abigail held a photo of the Folly’s front entrance to the red light and said, “Oh my God, it’s like the inside of one of the pyramids.”

Abigail was right. There were golden shapes like hieroglyphs all over the Folly’s entrance, especially around and on the door itself. Some of them were enclosed in shapes, not just plain ovals like cartouches but pentagrams and crosses and stars of David. On the steps in front of the door were patterns that reminded me of architectural plans for a fortress.

“The wards,” Isaiah whispered. They had to be. We’d never sensed vestigia coming into the Folly, but vestigia are after-images, and the wards were active. They were so complex. No wonder Nightingale couldn’t update them on his own.

“You told me about those,” said Abigail. “It’s why randoms can’t just walk into the Folly.”

“Yeah. Let’s have a look at the back of the house.” Sure enough, the coach house had the background glow of something designed and built by people, but wasn’t covered in the bright glyphs and patterns of the wards. I pointed it out to her. “That’s why we’ve got the tech cave back here.”

I took a moment to just stare at the wards, to take in exactly how much effort had gone into raising them. It made my ritual to raise the ghost of Henry Pyke at the churchyard look like a parlor trick. Nightingale had said that the wards were last renewed just after the war. It must have been the last magic many of his former colleagues ever performed before they broke their staffs or topped themselves. It was the last group effort of Newtonian magic before it all crumbled away, and only Nightingale was left.

Abigail cut me off from that pleasant line of thought by putting that photo down and holding up one of the Jag. “Look,” she said. “It _has_ got magic.”

The glow of Dust around the Jag had definite currents in it, with lots of curlicues and vortices centered on the driver’s seat. “DCI Thomas Nightingale,” Isaiah whispered in my ear, in his best imitation of my mum’s dæmon’s disapproving tone. “What sort of magic have you been getting up to in the Jag?”

“Does the magic make it run differently from normal cars?” Halei said, more to Abigail than to me. “It hasn’t got any microchips like a cell phone, but maybe it’s different now that it’s got all that vestigia.”

Abigail looked up at me expectantly. “I don’t know,” I said. “Like I said, he never told me anything about it. It’d be pretty cool if the Inspector had a magic car, though.”

I told Abigail to wait in the lobby, and left Isaiah with her to make sure she kept to her word. She didn’t mind; Halei was completely fascinated by Isaiah’s ability to separate and would probably spend the whole time grilling him with questions. I went upstairs and found Nightingale to show him the photos. I was glad I gave him some time to see them without Abigail there, because the look on his face when he saw the wards was so bright-eyed and intent I had to look away. I could hear a rustle of wings as Aletheia flew in from wherever she’d been to perch on his shoulder.

“I’m glad to see the wards are still in good order,” said Nightingale, his voice a little hoarse. I glanced back at him carefully. He wasn’t crying or anything, though Aletheia was still staring at the photographs with her eagle glare. “This will be a good lesson for young Abigail. I’ll tell her about the significance of some of the shapes in the wards. You should listen in, too. I haven’t taught you anything about wards yet, and it’s about time you started learning the principles.”

He started down the stairs, Aletheia gliding down by the railing. I followed, and of course I had to ask, “What sort of magic were you doing in the Jag?”

“There are _formae_ that can be used for driving.” Before I could open my mouth to reply, he added, “Which you are not to even consider learning until you’ve completed the advanced driving course.” Neither he nor Aletheia were looking back at me, but I could just hear the smirk. “And no, they’re not cheating. With or without magic, I can still navigate traffic on the M25 in less than half the time you can.”


End file.
